This book explores the possibility of integrating design thinking into today’s technical contexts. Despite the popularity of design thinking in research and practice, this area is still too often treated in isolation without a clear, consistent connection to the world of software development.
The book presents design thinking approaches and experiences that can facilitate the development of software-intensive products and services. It argues that design thinking and related software engineering practices, including requirements engineering and user-centric design (UX) approaches, are not mutually exclusive. Rather, they provide complementary methods and tools for designing software-intensive systems with a human-centric approach.
Bringing together prominent experts and practitioners to share their insights, approaches and experiences, the book sheds new light on the specific interpretations and meanings of design thinking in various fields such as engineering, management, and information technology. As such, it provides a framework for professionals to demonstrate the potential of design thinking for software development, while offering academic researchers a roadmap for further research.
Jennifer Hehn is Professor for Project Management and Agile Methods at the Institute for Digital Technology Management, Bern University of Applied Sciences, Switzerland and an associate researcher at the Management of AI Lab, Institute of Information Management, University of St.Gallen, Switzerland. Her research interests are design thinking, requirements engineering, and agile development techniques. As a consultant she has worked together with several international organizations in implementing design thinking.
Daniel Mendez is Professor for Software Engineering at the Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden, and a senior researcher at fortiss, the research institute of the Free State of Bavaria for Software-intensive Systems and Services. His research area is empirical software engineering with a special focus on interdisciplinary, qualitative research in requirements engineering and its quality improvement.
Walter Brenner is Professor and Managing Director of the Institute of Information Management at the University of St.Gallen, Switzerland. His research focuses on industrialisation of information management, management of IT service providers and innovation and technology management. Prior to his academic career, Professor Brenner worked as head of application development at Alusuisse-Lonza AG.
Manfred Broy was Professor and head of the Software & Systems Engineering group at the Technical University of Munich. His research interests are software and systems engineering comprising both theoretical and applied aspects including system models, specification and refinement of system components, specification techniques, development methods and verification.
